Fur starts to fly

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Fur sales are booming despite years of lobbying by the anti-fur brigade. Valerie Lawson investigates how the fashionistas beat the activists.

Mink is on the march, fox is on the hunt, and rabbit is hopping onto backs all over the world. Dead minks, dead foxes and dead rabbits. Fur has come back in fashion with such force that it's hard to find a catwalk in Europe without at least a trimming of fur.

But more surprising is the amount of fur on cheaper clothes marketed to young women whose mothers shivered at the thought of wearing dead animals on their backs.

It is no accident that the wheel has turned full circle, but more the result of a careful campaign by pelt marketers, coupled with a resurgence of 1930s to 1950s fashion. Back in style are round-toed shoes, brooches, pearls, fur tippets, nipped in waists tied with ribbon and more tweed than Miss Marple has stashed in her attic.

Despite attention-grabbing anti-fur campaigns, global fur sales have increased steadily in recent years, from $US8.2 billion in 1998-99 to $US11.3 billion in 2002-03, according to the British Fur Trade Association. While it may not be evident in Australia, fur is as popular as ever in European fashion capitals.

In Paris this week for the spring-summer 2005 shows, there are rabbit fur-trimmed coats, mink fur shrugs, fox fur scarves and fur coats staring back from shop windows. In London's Covent Garden, home to hundreds of boutiques, every window displays a piece of fur or fake fur. In Joseph, a fox scarf lies enticingly twisted among the tweed. At Accessorize, a fake fur scarf costs £18 ($45). At Nine West, a rabbit jacket is a steal at £150. At Zara, fur collars adorn most coats. Marks & Spencer offers a fake fur and chiffon wrap.

Anti-fur protesters squeal and jump on catwalks with "Fur kills" signs, but the march of fur goes on. In 2004 global fur sales are expected to rise for the sixth consecutive year. This is not due to chance.

At the low point in the fortunes of the fur trade, the world's largest producer of fashion furs such as mink and fox set up an educational and design facility at its headquarters outside Copenhagen. The producer is SAGA, the marketing division for the fur traders of Scandinavia and Finland. Frank Zilberkweit, owner of London's biggest furrier store, Hockley Furs, said the idea came from Boe Hansen, the chief executive of SAGA in 1988. The organisation wooed young and established fashion designers to Scandinavia to learn how fur could be used as a fashion fabric.

"Skills had been lost, with furriers going out of business," Zilberkweit said.

With SAGA's initiative, fur became a fabric, one that you buy in a fashion shop, rather than have it made up by a furrier. At the autumn 2004 fashion showings around the world, fur was seen in shrugs, edging cashmere cardigans, on handbags and boots, and knitted, sewn and shorn. No heavy grandma fox here, but playful, colourful and light fur.

A model wears a white fur stole and a black suit designed by Laurent Mercier.Photo:AP

More than 20,000 people have attended the SAGA design centre since 1988, according to a journalist from the Sunday Times, who visited the centre recently to see the teachers, and the minks and foxes in rows of cages in their two "halls".

When the time comes, the minks are gassed and the foxes are anally electrocuted. The horror of that image makes no impact on Richard D. North, a fellow of British think tank the Institute of Economic Affairs, who has written in defence of the fur trade.

"It's easier to be a mink on a mink farm than a pig on a pig farm," he said. "They are treated better than farm animals. They are not moved to their slaughter. They are killed quickly in situ." North believes the popularity of fur among young women is not related to their moral views. In fact, "they don't even think about the treatment of the animals".

"Fur has become fashionable again and women will wear anything that's fashionable," he said. "There are two reasons. A view of glamorousness has come back. A view of 'I've got it, and I'll flaunt it'." Secondly, fashion is related to art and fur's revival is connected to, "Brit Art and sensation, about Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst, the edginess of their art. A lot of it refers to animals. It's all to do with an aesthetic of edginess and danger. Fur is exciting because it's dangerous. Fur is an exciting idea precisely because it's controversial. Like the [fashion label] FCUK idea, something about being in your face, the f--- off factor.

"And it doesn't matter that [model] Naomi Campbell said fur was a bad idea and then said wearing it was a good thing to do. We take no comfort that Naomi said it was bad and nor do we take any notice when she says it is good."

North hates regulations, although he is not in favour of smoking in public places (still widely allowed in European cities).

Smoking, however, also damages the smoker, whereas wearing fur no longer damages the wearer as it did in the days when Sydney furrier Peter Hammerman was forced out of business by a protester called the Grim Reaper, and when women in furs might be covered in red paint thrown by an anti-fur activist. Those were the days when most furs looked like grandmother's. Most now look like fake fur, another phenomenon that has allowed real fur to return.

Some, however, still look like the repulsive scarves of the 1930s and '40s. Earlier this year, at European fashion weeks, Yves St Laurent showed fur coats with attached tails while Givenchy showed a handbag swaddled in a whole furry pelt complete with glassy eyed head, reports The Guardian newspaper.

Two years ago, Galliano featured a massive hat decorated with fox heads. This month at London Fashion Week, Zilberkweit spotted a woman in the audience at the Clements Ribeiro show wearing a fur wrap with the animal's head attached.

Designer Inacio Ribeiro has said: "I can't help liking fur and using it when I have the chance. But I'm not on a mission to persuade people to wear fur. I am pro-choice and have great respect for people who are anti-fur."

Zilberkweit has been told by Clements Ribeiro that sewing a fur collar on a coat doubled its cost, "but they sold double the number with the fur collar".

The fur comeback can be seen as a snowball that started with the SAGA campaign, then continued rolling with the backing of such designers as Jean Paul Gaultier who like to shock. The comeback gathered force with fur trade associations issuing press releases about celebrities such as Beyonce, Cate Blanchett, Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss wearing fur on the red carpet.

Then, last March, the London-based designer Matthew Williamson, who is collaborating with Hockley Furs to update the image of fur, said: "It's definitely cool to wear fur now. I see girls like Jade [Jagger] and Kate [Moss] who don't think it's un-PC any more."

THE fur industry was already in crisis when the stockmarket collapsed in 1987 and things got "a bit hairy", remembers Zilberkweit.

"A lot of my colleagues couldn't take the pressure, [but] it made me more determined ... I found a lawyer who was an expert in harassment. He stopped the protesters coming to our premises and home. We rode out the storm, but we never underestimate the dangers. The big problem was that fur didn't modernise, it got caught in the headlights. They were so worried about the protests they didn't worry about the products. We have to look at the product. It's very sexy, very nice."

That's not the view of PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) whose members have not given up the fight against the use of fur in fashion.

In February last year, at Julien Macdonald's fur and leather show, PETA protesters were thrown out. A month later, in Paris, a protester holding a sign "Fur kills" jumped onto the catwalk of the Gaultier parade. Security guards wrapped him in a fur coat as the audience tittered.

This week PETA is targeting the Paris fashion show.

Macdonald excuses his use of fur by saying he was inspired by sex and glamour, that none of the animals was raised for fur. All were rabbit and by-products of the meat industry.

But PETA's spokesman, Andrew Butler, says there is a misconception. "Rabbits used for fur are kept until they are older and their pelts are thicker. Very few pelts are recovered from the slaughter house."

When Zara began selling rabbit jackets this northern autumn, PETA protesters demonstrated outside stores and the garments were withdrawn. PETA is now planning to write to Nine West about their rabbit jackets and is pleased that upmarket department store Harvey Nichols has a no-fur policy.

The store's press officer, Iona Peel, said: "We've always had a no-fur policy except rabbit, which is a by-product of the food industry. Last season we had no fur at all, mainly due to reduced consumer demand. We do have shearling [which looks like fur, but is lamb skin and wool treated to look like fur].

These are small victories for the protesters. But in the main, the animals lose, the fur trade wins, and instead of the 1950s refrain "take back your mink", it's a case of "give me back my mink".